Vital records—the certificates recorded in local or state vital statistics offices—have traditionally been the first original records sought by newcomers to family history once they have exhausted home sources and the recollections of living relatives. Unfortunately, access to these records is becoming more and more restricted at the very time when they have become most significant for family history.

Vital records are the single most reliable source for information about the key events in the lives of our ancestors—the events that earlier were only recorded, if at all, in family Bibles or church records. Parents and children of people named in vital records can usually still obtain them, but access is becoming ever more restricted in response to growing concerns over privacy and identity theft.

Vital records are the government-required registrations of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and adoption name changes. In countries where civil government offices were established to keep records that earlier were the responsibility of state churches, they are known as civil registrations.

Most vital or civil registration records contain sufficient individual information, such as names, ages, and birthplaces of parents, to distinguish a record from those of others with the same name. However, they contain nothing that identifies the record positively with any particular person—no photograph, fingerprint, DNA profile, list of identifying marks, or other characteristics. This is ironic in view of the widespread acceptance of a birth certificate as evidence that the person holding it is the person named in it! In fact, birth certificates have no identifying value whatsoever, yet their misuse as a means of identification has been one of the...

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